Girl Country

Some other sad girl 
Says stop weeping, I say just
A minute please 
I take my hand to my heart
I look everyone in the eye
There is no sprawl like mine
Flung out my flush
Neck, bent legs
How to land? My country
Is a set of instructions
My country is full 
Of children and people 
who were once children
All the girls are happy
Inside their bathtubs
As if they had just sprung up
Dirty, dirty water 
But the floor is clean
I will not give 
These pink little boys any babies
My sister is so ready
I say why? She says nothing 
Then gathers earthworms
No love 
Truer than decay, she wants someone 
To stay and miss her
I tear up my old calendars
I lick my palm like sugar
I am happy in my purple bed
Sometimes I can see things from the window
I smile when they look at me
I once tried to find the heart
Of this place
I heard sounds of gears
Age of love and triumph
I turned around 
And reached for the red glimmer

Girl Country II 

I wanted a way to talk about my life outside of the singular.
The problem was not the sound of the words.
I wrote, the impossibility of the girl, not in spite of but because.
That feeling of materiality.
That symbol of the natural. That symbol of the national.

Leah said words do not fail, words are what we have.
Sometimes I think making anything is evil. 
Instead of doing anything, I slept.
I bled into a bowl.
I could have put that in any tense.

I wrote a poem or I wrote my nation.
I was trying to talk about the nation I hated. The way it made me and required me. 
Used my reactions of pleasure against me, against what I loved.
I saw myself, for a moment, in terms of that pastoral sprawl. 
Original and pristine. I laughed at this. The myth of the sprawl. 

Who loves a country because it is a nation?
And who loves a country because it is not?
When love and money are interchangeable.
Why would anything come first?
I said I wanted to be precise.

A kind of dexterity when you erase with words.
The body coheres against itself.
I don’t want to erect anything. 
To live is evil. To not live is evil. The problem with ‘am.’
To be and to be phobic of are not opposites.

If girls are visible it is because they are absent and therefore have form.
If no girls are real girls, then what is the point of talking to them or about them?
I expect to see my body as transparent but instead it is opaque and does things. 
I am here as opposed to somewhere else.
I am in a world that met me as it touched my face. 

Then sleeping again. And interrupted. Interrupting.
The room not mine but in a glow.
I said maybe it shouldn’t mean anything.
Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, my sister says.
Choose anything and redact it.

You think you are doing something and really you are doing something else.
How to make oneself clear?
The space between what you are and what you think you are.
Try dreaming. Try ‘to dream.’
Important that it not all come from the same instant, so that at a point it can collapse.

I wrote about bathtubs and the girls placed inside them. 
The problem of youth and cleanliness. 
The messy water, the way things dissolve and multiply. 
I wrote, I will not give these pink little boys any babies. 
I was trying to speak about the expectation. The capacity. 

There is no beginning. 
There’s an anxiety about…
Filling space. Always the lit entrance of the cave and the hole which fills it.
It isn’t feminine.
Negate. Negate.

I did not mean to reach for some original beauty, though I think I wanted it.
I wrote about searching for the inner organs of my country. 
Not because it belonged to me. Not because I was innocent. 
I wrote about the work of making people versus the work of making a nation. 
Found no real difference. 

I am afraid I am going to write the same poem for a hundred years.
My mother and my sisters. Are we not the same.
The gap stretched farther as the distance closes.
The trail back is long but not infinite.
If I said I slept I lied.

Every poem is the same poem.
Every word is a Father’s word.
I have something evil in me.
I asked, how do I know what I know and also live?
Form is content is form. 

I wrote about sticking my hand into the chest of my country. 
Getting caught in gears. 
A gear is something that can be toyed with, at least. 
I wrote about running, mostly out of fantasy. 
I knew I would not leave, even if I could. 

Indirect looking is not an ethic. It is looking.
I do though I do not want to.
A process not unlike editing.
Cynthia said eventually you develop a fluency.
So that you can talk forever without saying anything.

I did not want to make anything that would succeed.
There was a myth of a public language.
Those terms of co-optation and reification.
You can’t help but take on characteristics.
I said failure does not have to mean that something is lost.

That language fails to recognize what it contains.
That there is excess. That every girl fails.
I spoke of holes, tried to make holes.
A hole is an impossibility. Entrance could be a better word.
At the center of the darkness, girls running circles around the field.

The Garden

From where I stood, the green so far away from you

I desired the agency of a particle

Something reproducible in our dwelling

We had all hoped for a child

We had all hoped the scene would part to give us food

All fruits rot

But rot was freedom from the suburb

A vision of only weeds

It begets it begets it begets it

Where to place the flesh?

It’s the harness that’s fungible, not the beast

I fear even the drones themselves breathe

I fear the window-blinds and saplings sensing me

I was given no glimpse of the initial place

And the wall before me remained

I walked between the trees which all arced away from me

I always wanted to achieve grace of movement

What’s the point of living on an avenue?

I pitied the squirrel writhing in the trap and also the trap

To some it would be better to just have been dropped here

I’m so easily tricked

It’s still really you and what’s not you in orbit making a mess

That it was also the way the world tried to touch us

Easier not to acknowledge this sum as the garden